A new book is on my TBR: it’s called Into the Heart of Tasmania: A Search for Human Antiquity and it’s by historian Rebe Taylor. But as soon as I started reading it, I knew I wanted to read her first book, so I reserved that at the library… and lo! it was available the very next day. This promptness made me think I could read the book at my leisure and renew it if necessary, but no, *pout* somebody else wants it now and I’ve ended up having to dash through the last half of it because it’s due back tomorrow. So Unearthed, the Aboriginal Tasmanians of Kangaroo Island is not going to get the review it deserves from me, because I now don’t have time to read it all.

(But actually what Unearthed really deserves is a proper review from a proper historian and there seems not to be one online, only an archived Hindsight program about it on the ABC, and one lonely 4-line review at Goodreads. How has this happened to a book nominated for the 2003 Dobbie, that tells such an interesting story?)

Maybe it’s because Kangaroo Island doesn’t seem so very important in the national consciousness? Yet it’s our third-largest island (after Tasmania and Melville Island), and it’s a bit bigger than Majorca and Long Island. It’s also the site of first European settlement in South Australia – a settlement which followed an Indigenous settlement that predates the loss of the land bridge about 10,000 years ago when sea levels rose, creating the body of water now known as Backstairs Passage, separating Kangaroo Island from the Fleurieu Peninsula. Its Aboriginal name was Karta, ‘Isle of the Dead’ and there is a Dreaming story which tells the story of the people who did not get away in time from the flooding.

The fascinating aspect of this island’s settlement history is that modern day descendants of the sealers and Aboriginal women who re-settled Kangaroo Island in the early 19th century had – until recently – no idea of their ancestors’ existence. The simplistic explanation for this seems to be that the sealers, their Aboriginal ‘wives’ and their way of life had been given such a bad press that their story was suppressed both by their embarrassed descendants and by the victors in the land-grab.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/03/26/unearthed-the-aboriginal-tasmanians-of-kanga... ( )